Lin Piao Is a Devout Disciple of Confucius

The workers, peasants and soldiers, as masters of the
country, have thrown themselves heart and soul into the mass movement to criticize Lin Piao
and Confucius now developing in depth throughout China. They are the main force of this
movement.

Following are articles by some Peking workers and reports
on the movement in a village in Shantung Province’s Chufu County (Confucius’ native place)
and Tsinghua University. —Ed.

THE spokesman of the decadent slave-owning aristocracy
Confucius* (551-479 B.C.) has been dead a good two thousand years and
more, but his reactionary ideology has been in continuous use by successive reactionary
ruling classes. The renegade and traitor Lin Piao, like all reactionaries in history, also
reeked of reactionary Confucian ideology. “Restrain oneself and restore the rites” was
Confucius’ reactionary programme for restoring the slave system and he spent a lifetime
running from place to place peddling it. Under the socialist system, Lin Piao also harped
on this old refrain about “restraining oneself and restoring the rites.” On a scroll he
hung in his bedroom, he had written: “Of all things, this is the most important: to
restrain oneself and restore the rites,” i.e., the most important thing was to restore
capitalism. This fully demonstrates that Lin Piao and Confucius both trod the same old
path of restoring the old system. Master and disciple, they were separate in time but
identical in their reactionary nature.

Confucius lived towards the end of the Spring and Autumn
Period (770-476 B.C.) when slave uprisings were frequent because of the slave-owning
aristocracy’s harsh exploitation and oppression and when new, feudal relations of production
were in the ascendant and unprecedented social changes were under way. A faithful running-dog
of the slave-owning aristocracy, Confucius who had an ardent love for the dying slave society
viewed the rising feudal system with extreme trepidation and great hatred. He abused the
revolutionary actions of the rebelling slaves as “offending their superiors and creating
havoc” and was consumed with hatred for the Legalists who were against the slave-owning
system and advocated the rule of “law.” He wandered from state to state offering his shoddy
goods of “restraining oneself and restoring the rites and all under heaven will submit to
benevolence,” hoping that people would restrain their desires and act according to the rites
of the slave system of the Chou Dynasty, i.e., “not to look at things, listen to things, say
things and do things which do not conform to the rites.”

Workers at the Peking People’s Printing House
write criticisms of Confucius on a blackboard.

He tried by his mumbo-jumbo of “restraining oneself and
restoring the rites” to revive extinct states under the slave system, restore the reactionary
rule of the slave-owning aristocracy, reinstate the decadent old aristocrats who had lost
their power and privileges and go back to the slave society of Western Chou (circ.
1066-771 B.C.) of his dreams. It can be seen from this that “restraining oneself and
restoring the rites” publicized by Confucius was a reactionary programme of the slave-owning
aristocracy for restoring the slave system.

That bourgeois careerist, conspirator, double-dealer,
renegade and traitor Lin Piao, the devout disciple of Confucius, took over this reactionary
Confucian ideology as a reactionary ideological weapon to subvert the dictatorship of the
proletariat and restore capitalism. He watched with deep hatred and fear the great victories
won in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the unprecedented consolidation of
the dictatorship of the proletariat and promptly undertook to restore capitalism as the most
important thing. For this reason Lin Piao seized upon Confucius’ “restraining oneself and
restoring the rites” as a precious gift and held it close to his heart. If old Confucius
down in the underworld could gave heard what Lin Piao said, he would have jumped with joy
and crowed: “Just like me! Just like me! He not only resembles me ideologically, he uses my
very words!”

People may well ask why the words and deeds of Lin Piao
and Confucius were so similar despite the lapse of more than two millenniums between them.
This is not very strange. They both had the same counter-revolutionary stand and carried out
a political line of restoration and retrogression. “Restraining oneself and restoring the
rites, all under heaven will submit to benevolence” which Confucius clamoured about had the
reactionary political aim of “reviving states that have been extinguished, restoring families
whose line of succession has been broken, and calling to office those who have retired to
obscurity.”

The wild panegyrics of Lin Piao, who was a running-dog of
the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes, for “restraining oneself and restoring the
rites” as uniquely the biggest and the most important thing were aimed at restoring capitalism
and “liberating politically” all the overthrown landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries,
bad elements, and Rightists at home and reinstating them; internationally, he begged for the
“nuclear umbrella” of the Soviet revisionists, trying to become a tsarevitch of the Soviet
revisionist new tsars and turn China back into a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society.

The wheel of history, however, rolls inexorably forward.
Peddling “restraining oneself and restoring the rites,” Confucius in his time could not prevent
the slave society from being replaced by the feudal society. Lin Piao’s attempt to use
“restraining oneself and restoring the rites” to drag socialist China back into capitalism
also was a hankering for the impossible!

Chairman Mao has taught us: “The socialist system will
eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man’s
will.” The cause of socialism in our great motherland is advancing, triumphantly everywhere.
Lin Piao and his gang’s vain attempt to stem this revolutionary torrent only resulted in their
being drowned by it and being completely obliterated!